Sunday, 7 May 2017

In this photo taken on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 a boy walks
up the stairs before lunch inside his home in western Mosul, Iraq.
Iraqi forces are making slow progress in the fight against the Islamic
State group in Mosul. Meanwhile, food supplies are running dangerously
low for civilians trapped inside militant-held territory and those
inside recently retaken neighborhoods.: photo by Bram Janssen/AP, 3 May 2017

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — Aliyah Hussein and the 25 family members
sheltering with her in Mosul’s western Mahatta neighborhood are
surviving by picking wild greens growing in a park near their home.
Hussein mixes the vegetables with small amounts of rice and tomato paste
to make a thin soup that is often her family’s only meal.

Her cousin Zuhair Abdul Karim said on a recent day that even with the wild greens, the food ran out.

“I swear to God, we are hungry. (The Islamic State group) made us
hungry. They didn’t leave anything for us, they even stole our food,”
Hussein said. Her home sits just a few hundred yards (meters) from the
front line in the battle for western Mosul.

As Iraqi forces continue to make slow progress in the fight against
IS in the city, clawing back territory house by house and block by
block, food supplies are running dangerously low for civilians trapped
inside militant-held territory and those inside recently retaken
neighborhoods. For families like Hussein’s, safety concerns make them
unreachable for most humanitarian groups.

Although Hussein has technically been liberated, her neighborhood is
still too dangerous for most humanitarian groups to reach. In the past
week she said she received only one box of food consisting of rice, oil
and tomato paste, barely enough to feed her entire family even for a
single day.

“The women didn’t have lunch. Only the children and men have eaten,”
Abdul Karim said, explaining that he and his family are now living meal
to meal. “We don’t know if we’ll have dinner,” he said, “maybe or maybe
not.”

Some families walk several kilometers (miles) to markets that have
sprung up in neighborhoods that have been under Iraqi military control
longer. But prices there are high. Most families have exhausted their
savings and work is almost non-existent in Mosul, a city now been ripped
apart by war.

“The humanitarian world needs to realize that there is a huge gap
between people who are in the safe zone and people who are actually
trapped in the no man’s land between the Iraqi controlled areas and ...
Daesh controlled areas,” said Alto Labetubun with Norwegian People Aid,
one of the few groups operating in neighborhoods close to the front
line. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Some 300,000 to 500,000 people remain beyond anyone’s reach, trapped
in IS-held Mosul neighborhoods, according to the United Nations. For
those civilians, siege-like conditions have prevented food supplies from
reaching them for more than six months.

Most of those civilians are estimated to be in Mosul’s old city,
where the final battles of the operation are expected to play out. If
the fighting there lasts many more weeks, the U.N. warns the
consequences for civilians will be “catastrophic.”

“We know we have a problem because when people reach our camps the
first thing they ask for is food,” said Lise Grande, the U.N.
humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. She said it’s impossible to measure
exactly how many families are facing what she described as “serious
hunger” inside Mosul, but the conditions of the people fleeing the city
paint a grim picture of those who remain trapped.

Hundreds of infants and young children who recently fled Mosul are
being treated for malnutrition, Grande said. Separately, she added that
the U.N. had received reports that even baby formula in IS-held
neighborhoods is now no longer available,

“If the battle goes beyond (the next few weeks), then we have a catastrophic problem,” she said.

In the Wadi al-Hajar neighborhood hundreds of people queue for food
boxes delivered by Norwegian People Aid. But most of them are turned
around as there aren’t enough supplies to go around. A small crowd of
women begged the aid workers for food after the last boxes were handed
out.

Ibrahim Khalil, also turned away, said his hunger was so intense, he felt like he was starving.

“Didn’t they claim they’d liberate us from Daesh?!” he said referring
to the Iraqi government, “and they’d change our lives from misery to
happiness?”

Smoke rising from the horizon in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in April. A
new offensive is intended to accelerate an operation that had slowed to a
crawl.: photo by
Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse, 25 April 2017

Smoke rising from the horizon in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in April. A
new offensive is intended to accelerate an operation that had slowed to a
crawl.: photo by
Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse, 25 April 2017

7 May 2340

Most of those starburst fractures that form on the windows of the dream disappear after a day or two but still the turning against reason, the broken motivation to champion life against history, the regressive dependence on taste, the prioritizing of epochs that resulted in, for example, 2560 emerging from the shadow of her wicked sister 2340, but only long enough to fade back into the penumbra, as the enormous frontal hull now blocked out the sun; the nebulous philosophies of life; the admission of powerlessness; the waste of shame clown suit torn and grease spotted; the large gash in one limb; the night wobble by the tunnel path; the thundering deer; the shaggy fugal trees; the densefog; the bone chill and the happy tune, playing over the crematorium sound system, adding a bit of melodic depth to the glistening surface cell lattice -- all these remain to be erased before morning...